Islam and the Victorians: Nineteenth Century Perceptions of Muslim Practices and Beliefs (review)

Though Islam and the Victorians is not the first monograph on Victorian perceptions of Islam, earlier treatments such as Philip C. Almond's Heretic and Hero: Muhammad and the Victorians (1989) and this reviewer's Victorian Images of Islam (1992) focus on academic and missionary writing, not on fiction. While Shahin Kuli Khan Khattak refers to nonfiction, her main concern—how writers of fiction depicted Islam in the Victorian age—fills a lacuna in this field. She addresses English representations of Muslims and Islam in the Ottoman Empire and in their own Indian colonies. She begins her substantive discussion with a rather sweeping generalization: "'faction,'" she writes, "seems to be an appropriate epithet for the genre of literature which, during and before the nineteenth century, introduces the subject of Islam and its Prophet Muhammad, into the western world. . . . Misrepresentation is generally manifest in all" (11). Of course, the Qur'an, which cannot be said to misrepresent Islam, had been rendered into English and into other European languages before the nineteenth century. Yet as dangerous as generalizations are, Khattak's comment may be justified by most of the period's literature, which does express hostility toward Islam. Indeed, she says, earlier work on delineating bias and the causes of bias allows us to "presuppose the fact that misconceptions were prevalent" (10). Where she sets out to shed fresh light on the subject is in her "analysis of the Islamic concepts that were misrepresented" (10).

Khattak makes it easy to navigate through her book by treating the historical and political, literary, and cultural backgrounds in consecutive chapters followed by a discussion of general misconceptions. Her treatment of the first draws mainly on nonfiction. Here, she establishes that the Victorians saw themselves as racially and culturally superior to the colonized people of the world. The uncolonized Ottomans "provided a semblance of opposition" to European hegemony and became "the embodiment of the 'Muslim'"; as such, they simply had to be "pilloried" (35). Turkey's place in Europe was already regarded as deeply problematic. As long as it practiced laws derived from the Qur'an, laws the English saw as "subversive of morality and justice" and as especially oppressive of women (36), Turkey could not join Europe. Khattak says that the Ottomans were invariably depicted as bloodthirsty and that all Turks were burdened with acts committed by a few and, since they were Muslim, so were Muslims everywhere else.

Travelers began to bring material home with them. Interestingly, some of the literature that reached the West, where it was received with fascination, was not "regarded by the indigenous people" as "work of quality" (47); neither The Arabian Nights or the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám were highly regarded by Ottomans. Many allusions to Muslim life in Victorian fiction had roots in these fabulous tales, which, however, have little if any relationship with any corresponding Muslim reality. Treating The Arabian Nights as a valid source of information is rather like "asking people in the east to form an opinion of Christendom on the basis of the Arthurian legends," Khattak observes (56). Khattak's discussion here of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and others is among the most interesting material in the book. What seems to have found the readiest audience was the East as exotic, offering forbidden fruits. Sections on music and art are equally informative and break fresh ground. The dominant motif in music and art was the Saracen as a figure of excess. Artists depicted Oriental potentates clothed in sumptuous attire surrounded by exotic women, and the emerging field of ethnomusicology focused on the seductive rhythms and cadences of Islamic music.

It is only in the final chapter that Khattak really discusses the Islamic concepts that were misrepresented. Although she provides a useful summary, it is too short to deal with the complexity of the issues, which include tolerance, jihad...